For younger students, you need to be really intentional about how you teach basic history skills and to keep students engaged you have to make your lessons fun! Personally, I always start my Foundation history program with a unit about families. If you’re interested in the activities I use for this unit, I’ve shared more in this post. Read on for some fun Foundation history activities (for those of you not from Australia, Foundation is the same as Kindergarten in the US).
Exploring Past and Present
There are many fun Foundation history activities you can use to teach history in an engaging way. Once your students understand that families are multi-generational, it can be helpful to introduce them to new vocabulary words such as past, present, future, then, now, long ago, olden days, time, change, before and after.
Reading different books is an amazing way to help students grasp these new words. Here are a few of my favourites:
Sequencing Events
Another foundational history concept is sequencing significant events in their lives. In my classroom, we start with a group discussion about when they were a baby. Some great questions I like to ask are: “What did you do when you were a baby? Did you have favourite toy? Do you have any pictures you could show us?”
From there, I ask students to draw a picture of something that reminds them of when they were a baby. We use this Sequencing Significant Events activity to draw our images. We repeat this step for three other time frames – “Last Year”, “Now”, and “In the Future”. You can do this all in one lesson or break these steps up depending on the group of students.
After this, students cut out each box and glue them in chronological order on the template. This isn’t as easy as it seems because the drawing sheet is in a random order so they really have to think about it. I love this Foundation history activity because it gives me a way to prove my students have mastered these concepts.
If you have older students, you may want to check out this Sequencing Significant Items and Events activity. It is better suited to Year One and helps students create a memory box about the stages of their lives. This activity also includes a cut and paste activity to help you assess student learning.
Teaching History Using Toys
One of my favourite Foundation history activities is using toys as a way to teach students what life was like in the past. There are so many different ways to make “olden days” toys. Below are a some ideas for creating olden days toys in your classroom.
A Real Mr. Potato Head
This was a super fun and engaging activity. We provided the students with potatoes, carrots, cucumber, celery, sultanas, toothpicks and wool to create their very own Mr Potato head. We then did a comparison between olden days Mr Potato Heads and modern. plastic Mr Potato Heads.
Spinning Tops
Making our own spinning tops from CDs was an absolute blast!
All you need is:
- Old CDs or DVDs
- Bottle tops
- Marbles
- Hot glue gun
- Markers for decorating
How to Make:
- Colour in the shiny side of the CD with coloured permanent markers.
- On the undecorated side of the CD use a hot glue gun to place glue around the small inner circle.
- Carefully place a marble into the hole and hold in place until the glue sets.
- Use the hot glue gun to place a ring of glue around the rim of a bottle top.
- Place the bottle top over the small inner circle on the coloured in/ decorated side of the CD. Hold in place until the glue has set.
How to Use:
Hold the bottle top with your fingertips and use your wrist to spin the spinning top. Your students will have hours of fun practicing to spin. We even timed whose spinning top spun for the longest.
Wooden Spoon Dolls
Another fun hands-on activity was creating our own wooden spoon dolls. We simply drew faces on a wooden spoon with markers, added wool for hair and used some fabric for clothing.
There are so many more fun things you can do for Foundation history activities, but I always finish off with this Past and Present History Toy Sort as a fun way to assess how well my students are grasping these concepts. If your students need some fine motor practice, this is also a great opportunity to pull out some old catalogues to let students get some cutting experience.
You might also find these Foundation History resources useful:
Past and Present Toy Soldier Craft
Foundation HASS Australian Curriculum Reporting Grade Descriptors
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